Venice (part III)

The
last of the Bellinis was finishing his long labor of technical preparation and
of the maturing of the senses, and Carpaccio was collecting, in a burst of
intense rapture, all the decorative and picturesque elements upon which the
great painters will draw for almost a century, at the moment when Venetian
power was shaken by the fall of Constantinople, which closed the Orient to her,
and by the maritime discoveries which gave to the world a new center of
commerce. The city then recoiled upon herself to reach her depths through the
soul of her artists. Venice was like a being overflowing with strength and
health whose need to organize life against the incessant assaults of difficult
surroundings and of semibarbarous peoples had left no time to indulge in
pleasure. Once the city had tasted of pleasure, she yielded herself without
restraint; she gave herself over to the desires and the energy of which her
senses had accumulated so rich a store. She died of it, like those animals so
bursting with life that they die in the act of reproduction. Her death
transmitted to the future, in inner wealth, the outward opulence which she had
amassed for six centuries.

Giorgione,
Palma, Lorenzo Lotto, Bonifazio, Basaiti, Pordenone, Sebastiano del Piombo, and
Titian, all pupils or disciples of Giovanni, arrived together to pluck the
fruits which were bending down the branches, and at the same time to celebrate,
in a frenzy of painting never attained before, the rehabilitation of material
nature, to which man is invariably forced to return when he has been wandering
for too long a time in the beautiful desert of the pure idea; to celebrate also
the death struggle and apotheosis of that sensuality of which the ancient world
had bequeathed the legend. From that time on, like products of the earth,
overflowing pellmell from baskets filled to overflowing, and spreading over the
roads to the rhythm of the step of those who carry them, the pictures and frescoes
are scattered in the palaces, on the walls, in the churches quite as much and
even more than in other places—telling the story of the festivals, fetes,
dances, concerts in great miraculous settings, the depths of the skies, the
forests, the springs, the nude flesh quivering with warmth as it awaits the
passage of love.

The
unity of sentiment, of action, of surroundings, and of life was such that one
among the painters of this time may define almost all of them. Titian contains
the whole of Venice, from the Bellinis to Veronese and even to Tiepolo. But
Titian is more than sketched in Giorgione, born the same year with him and
dying two thirds of a century before him; and if the pious and gentle and
discreet Lorenzo Lotto, who, before Veronese, saw the fine ash of Venice
raining upon his color, has gathered up only certain surface reflections from
the greatest painters, Palma and Sebastiano del Piombo, Basaiti and Bonifazio
himself, and even the severe Pordenone who was officially his rival, all
resemble Titian. They all have, in a less ample and less personal way, the
larger part of his profound quality. Moreover, they had no hesitation about
borrowing ideas and images. They lived by continuous exchanging, like the
population and the atmosphere of their city. It is in times of national anaemia
that the artists resort to economies. When life has this exuberance, it takes
no note of its borrowing. The creeping vines of tropical forests do not prevent
the trees about whose branches they entangle themselves from growing tall and
wide. Among all the contemporaries of Titian, we find the same abundance, the
same compelling and peaceful power of transposing the elements of the universe
into a new order, generalizing and lyrical, and of bathing life and the space in
which it moves in the golden amber of the background, from which there arises a
red vapor.

The
"Concert Champêtre" marks the decisive moment of the great painting;
it is the point of departure for Titian. The symphony is born and wells up
suddenly; its waves seek and penetrate one another; all the blood of Venice is
concentrated in a single heart, a warm heart, regular and calm, which sends
forth life with the admirable power of him who is master of himself. A world
which is to die, for the first time and with all its means affirms the
immortality of desire, of music, and of the intelligence, by associating them
with unchanging nature, which offers itself up for their justification. The
powers of fecundation retire into themselves and wait in the depths for the
moment of full maturity. With Giorgione, the autumn of Venice begins, a heavy
splendor, the sonorousness of the seasons when the fruits seem to concentrate
the flame and heat of the sun, when their translucent purple barely arrests the
light, when the evening is copper-colored, when the women, glowing under their
first caresses and heavy in their first maternity, adorn their flesh with great
necklaces of amber. Their skin is golden and almost somber, as if the blood
that flushes it had received through it a kiss from each one of the burning
days which have dawned since the world learned the meaning of pleasure. And
yet, in the heart of the deep landscape where they he, the blue landscape
sinking in the distance, their bodies take on a royal splendor like a living
sun which spreads over the russet cottages and over the noble groups of trees a
glow so warm and so rich that it seems to forbid the winter from returning and
the night from falling again. We scarcely know Giorgione, we cannot affirm the
authenticity of more than three or four of his works, but we cannot imagine
them otherwise than bathed in the atmosphere of a late summer afternoon, when
the motionless light is amassed in the stifling shadow, when one would imagine
that the wind rose only to make us perceive perfumes which until then had been
in material form. Perhaps it was well that he died young, thus giving time to
the more severe and patient genius of Titian to gain possession of itself. His
painting is as intoxicating as an overheavy wine.

It has
been said of this painting, of Titian's above all, of that of Veronese, and of
all the painters of Venice, with the exception perhaps of Tintoretto, that it
is altogether objective, that it never reveals the opinion of the artist
respecting the meaning and the morality of the world. It is a question of
words. There is no one among those for whom form is but a means of translating
pure ideas, whether he is called Giotto, or da Vinci or Michael Angelo, who is
not gifted, in the highest degree, with the sense of living reality and who
does not incorporate it with his own substance after having experienced it
passionately. There is no one among those for whom form is an end, whether he
is called Titian, Rubens, or even Velasquez, who does not discontinue his
objectivism the moment that he is finished assembling the elements of his work
in order to transpose them all into an imaginary reality which will define his
mind. All the languages that we speak, painting as well as the others,
symbolize our thought, and whether it accepts or does not accept the world, the
world which it expresses will be a living world if our thought is living; our
thought will live if the world which expresses it has been penetrated by that
thought. Michael Angelo and Titian, though, without doubt, they started from
different horizons, meet halfway along their journey.

Titian,
in this group of great Venetians at the beginning of the heroic period, is,
moreover, through his great compositions, his nudes, his landscapes, and his
portraits, the one among them all who most frequently returns to Nature in
order to concentrate her in the narrow space of a canvas, after having
co-ordinated in his will and his desire all the elements of form, color, light,
and sentiment, through which she imposes love. Palma Vecchio, who is so
magnificent with his big, blond-haired women, abandons himself to the
intoxication of painting the colors of flesh and of stuffs; he has not that
rhythm, as vast as sensibility and as tense as reason, by means of which Titian
presents his thought to us. Sebastiano del Piombo, who lived for more than
thirty years at Rome, is captivated there by the masters of its school. Superb
painter he is, with a somber splendor that glows about his dark women with
their peaceful eyes, with their large, full bodies, almost animal in character,
wherein something of the immense circulation of life that Venice will discover
in nature penetrates the thick muscles, the breasts, the backs, the arms, and
the legs, as if the sense of volume which Rome gave were too limited to
maintain this life and had allowed it to overflow on all sides. But he is
dominated by Raphael, to whom, in return, he reveals as much of Venice as
Raphael needed in order to make his work a synthesis of Italy, and he is dominated
even more by Michael Angelo, whom he will imitate too frequently. Giorgione is
dead, Lorenzo Lotto effaces himself in his discreet melancholy, Pordenone,
Basaiti, and Bonifazio remain artists of the second rank. Titian is to fill an
entire century summarize the whole extent and duration of Venice, reveal
Tintoretto and Veronese to themselves, dominate Europe through the works which
he sends forth behind the armies of Charles the Fifth, define forever the
language of painting, project upon the future the shadows of Rubens, Rembrandt,
Velasquez, Poussin, Watteau, Delacroix, and the modern landscapists, and
justify, by his last works, the audacities of the artists of our time.